The Washington Department of Transportation has to date deployed (as have other state transportation departments) a multitude of traffic sensors on highways and roads throughout the state of Washington. These sensors typically measure the volume and average speed of traffic for the covered road segments. Were these traffic sensors to be shared through an access infrastructure that allows any authorized sensing application to access data, multiple applications, such as, traffic characterization, congestion prediction, cab fleet management systems, or urban planning tools could obtain and use data streams from these sensors. In existing systems, each individual application has singularly obtained data directly from sensors and thereafter has performed its computations, quantifications, appraisals, assessments, calibrations, analyses, predictions, and the like, in perfect isolation from other applications that can be performing identical, and/or partially similar, estimations, measurements, triangulations, manipulations, and/or functions.
Consider the following example of sensing tasks that can be provided to and/or supplied by such sensing applications. A commuter consistently gets stuck in traffic on the way home from work. To avoid this daily aggravation the commuter now wishes to determine the average time on a route covering k road segments every 15 minutes in a time window extending from 3 pm to 7 pm, and then wants the minimum over all of these, repeating this determination for each day of the work week. The commuter submits this sensing task to an appropriate sensing application. Unbeknownst to the individual commuter, as well as other sensing applications, there can have been many other sensing tasks submitted by other equally frustrated commuters within the same city where the routes specified contain common road segments and overlapping departure time windows or time horizons.
The subject matter as claimed therefore is directed toward resolving or at the very least mitigating, one or more of the issue elucidated above.